As someone working in the events industry with a background in fashion, I’ve been fascinated by the way in which brands like Balenciaga, Burberry, Louis Vuitton and Rag & Bone have adapted their thinking and embraced technology in response to the pandemic.
Whether it’s AR scanners, virtual makeup, 3D printed clothing, lab grown leather jackets, or diamonds made from air pollution, fashion is no stranger to adapting to the times. Now that the global runway shows have had to change too, I think the creativity and new technology used by the fashion industry can give us event creators some food for thought.
The brands
‘Virtual fashion’ isn’t entirely new, but the current landscape, platform and audiences are. Rag & Bone’s S/S 2020 collection partnered with Microsoft’s Azure Kinect DK technology and transformed catwalk models into 3D Cloud-point data versions of themselves. The S/S 2021 collection ‘Metamorphosis’ extended that partnership; this time the collection was created remotely on the Cloud and supported by Azure Virtual Machines to display a silver avatar in digitised clothing that moved in the ‘breeze.’
Image courtesy of rag & bone
Louis Vuitton held a socially distanced show at La Samaritaine in the summer months of 2020 and streamed live to LinkedIn. The show used several individual cameras with a 360-degree view, to represent a digital guest and their view of the show. Throughout the building, green screens projected energetic trapeze artists across the space, creating another dimension that worked for both in-person and virtual attendance. Meanwhile, Burberry was the first luxury brand to stream its S/S 2021 live on gaming network Twitch. Although this was not Twitch’s typical audience, they got around concurrent 42,000 live views. Their Autumn/Winter 2021 collection had more than 100,000 views.
© Courtesy of Burberry
And finally, Balenciaga created a collection that included a virtual reality runway and a game, ‘Afterworld: The Age of Tomorrow’ that could be played through Oculus VR Headsets. After the initial launch, the game was made available for everyone on their site for a short time. During the game storyline, players were taken out of stores into dystopian city landscapes and dark forests, taking on different challenges along the way. Over the past few years, brands have dabbled with gamification and apps, but none have wowed me quite like this one.
Image courtesy of Balenciaga
What could this mean for corporate events?
Ultimately, it’s been fascinating to see how the fashion and event space have adapted to the disruption of the pandemic, using new platforms and creative technologies to give audiences a re-imagined event experience. For me, that is something all event leaders should take inspiration from. It may be new in 2021 to use a game to launch a fashion collection, but at the current pace of change, who knows which innovations we might be discussing in 12 months’ time?
I hope that when in real life events return, we retain a technology-focused and hybrid element. That could be through gamification, VR, streaming or all of the above. For me, it opens the door to bigger audiences and innovative creative outlets. After all, when we plan events, it’s not just about how many people we can fit in a room; it’s about how we make the most of the space, a global audience, innovative technologies and our creative ideas.